Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Unless I'm missing something in my search queries, Google ain't coming up with anything. I'm trying to look for samples of printouts from emails (hosts are irrelevant) made in the early 2000's. It's for a novel project. While I have a vague idea of what kind of layout is needed, it's one thing to guess, and another to actually see it. Any leads?

As a railfan and a graphic designer, the first thing I check out when in a new town with public transit is their transit map. You can tell a lot about a city by how they represent themselves on a transit map, and I myself have designed more maps than I can count. What's the map of your city look like? Do you have a personal favourite you think is really unknown? Any maps that you just want to rant about because of how terrible it is?

My personal favourite transit map is Constantine Konovalov's Paris Metro Map, I just love how effortlessly it weaves the lines throughout the Peripherique, and how it's not afraid to break its own established rules on angles and circles. Honorable mentions go to the London Tube and Rail map (an absolute classic), and the Mexico City Metro, which assigns a unique symbol to every station for the benefit of passengers who can't read or write.

Also, designers, feel free to share your transit diagrams! I miss r/transitdiagrams a lot and would love to see your work, fictional, redesign or otherwise!

Where do you share the art that you make with the world? Do you use a social media site? A personal website? Do you keep it all to yourself? Is your art something that can't be shared online so easily?

I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.

I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.

But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:

1. A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
2. Layoffs have further upped the available workers
3. AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.

I also have some personal situations at play:

1. I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
2. I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.

All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.

With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?

What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?

I'm a software developer working with a small team, and our Google Drive folder tree of UI assets/illustrations/app icons/etc. is becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. Aside from proper versioning, symlinks would be a major plus. Both are kinda-sorta possible with GDrive, but not in a reliable way.

I'm happy to take on a reasonable amount of management myself, although the easier it is for the designers themselves to work with the software, the better. Paid solutions are fine, although open source would be preferable (even as a hosted service) to avoid vendor lock-in down the line.

My instinct is to go with git/GitHub on the basis that we're already deeply familiar with it from the dev side, the GitHub desktop app isn't too onerous for non-techies, and we're already paying for it. That said, I'd be very interested in anyone's real-world experience of git for multiple gigs of 10-200MB binary files. I've heard that it's not especially well suited, although that might be out of date knowledge?

Beyond that, I'm open to almost anything. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't been able to find a single "gold standard" piece of software here, in the way that git is for developers, but maybe I haven't been searching well enough? Any pointers in the right direction or stories of what has/hasn't worked for your teams would be a huge help!

My fiance is an artist who was laid off because he worked for a major employer in the entertainment industry that required him to be in contact with people.

So he's been unemployed for a long time now, but he has been trying to find work, but there isn't really anything available that uses his particular skills. So we invested in a digital art workstation (basically just bought a monitor with a digitizer built in to use a pen with) so that he could work on becoming an independant artist. But he's so bad at marketing and he spends so much time worrying about fine details that it takes him over a week to finish a single piece, so he hasn't had any success.

So if you combine this with a broken tooth that he hasn't been able to get taken care of because of a lapse in his dental insurance, he's not been in a good place.

I just bought a Mac and was looking for mac-native graphics programs (I sometimes work on marketing, so I need to do photo editing from time to time. Also I used to do photography as a hobby and want to get back into it), when I came across Serif's Affinity Designer Workbook. And I thought to myself that getting my fiance a training course in graphic design would allow him to shift gears into a segment where there is more work. It'll also give him a bit of a kick in the pants to get him moving and feeling better about himself.

I'm sure everyone knows there are millions of online training courses available right now, so I'm hoping someone might have any recommendations. I have some money saved up, so I don't mind paying a little bit extra if it'll result in better results. I'd prefer if it were a class that didn't rely on Adobe Illustrator if possible, but I know that it's the 'standard' and he'll probably have better luck if he has experience in it.